Do you plan your days carefully, or just do work as it comes in?

Doing things as they come in is a risky approach to work. While smaller tasks may be completed quickly, big projects will keep getting pushed to one side. The same applies to ignoring larger tasks in favour of the “easy” work, or the things you want to do.

Instead of feeling the need to take action as soon as a new job comes in, add the task to your to-do list and continue with whatever you were working on previously. With emails, let them sit in your inbox for a bit - don’t jump into your email straight away.

Every day, set aside some time to review your outstanding work. This needs to be a time when you will not be interrupted. Don’t go thinking you should be “on call” 24/7 if your job doesn’t actually require it. Divert your phone to voicemail, or turn it off. Close your email and instant messengers. Then start getting organised.

Use a proper organisational tool. Todoist is a simple but effective way to manage multiple workstreams. You can use dates, priorities and sub-projects to organise the things you need to do. If you don’t want to use Todoist (and I’d recommend that you at least try it out), find another tool that’s more structured than a sheet of paper or a Word document. I’ve tried both methods. Todoist is far better than a top-to-bottom list.

Reorder your tasks so they appear in a logical sequence. Give them dates so you can tell whether you’re on schedule or not. If you get ahead of schedule, reorganise the remaining tasks so they reflect the new dates. Reorganise if you get behind, too. This really helps you to stay on top of your workload.

Don’t get over-ambitious. Write everything down, but prioritise what you know you’ll be able to do on the days when you know you’ll be able to work. Keep it realistic, be ambitious if you can, but don’t go overboard.

Keep an eye on tasks that get out of control. What’s causing the delay? How will you know when they are completed? Could you break them down to stand a better chance of completing them? Ensure you communicate with your customers about any tasks that may overrun.

Set aside time to DO THE WORK! It’s all very well doing all this planning, and some days you may be very busy, but don’t say “I’m going to do this today” and then get caught up with phone calls and emails. There’s no excuse. Customers will get tired of your excuses if you keep putting things off until “tomorrow”. Tomorrow never comes.

Review and improve. Are you any good at estimating your timescales? Are you getting things done? Monitor your progress and consider whether you could be doing better. Continuous improvement is a vital part of working.

How do you manage your working schedule?

Can you avoid unnecessary meetings?

How many times have you attended a meeting that didn’t seem to serve a purpose? A meeting where you didn’t need to be there? Or a meeting that was badly organised and just went on forever?

I’ve been to a few like that. Avoid wasting your time. Here are some ways to maximise the value of meetings.

Ask if you need to be there.

Do this in advance of the meeting. Why have you been invited? What will you be able to contribute? Is it essential that you attend the meeting or could you simply provide information in an email?

Some people may go on about encouraging face to face or at least verbal communication as opposed to email. But for very detailed information, especially technical documents, it can be a lot easier to provide the information in an email.

Get an agenda.

Every meeting should have an agenda. If not, there’s a risk that it will meander and take much longer than it needs to. An agenda is good because it clearly shows the subjects that will be discussed, and with timescales the chairperson can ensure that discussions stick to the schedule.

Prepare in advance.

Sometimes you won’t know exactly what will be said until the meeting starts. But it helps to have some idea. If you can prepare, the meeting will be that much easier. Otherwise, you’ll just end up saying “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” and half of the discussions become follow-up actions. By then, perhaps a meeting wasn’t even needed.

Bring a pen and some paper.

Always expect to write something down. It’s better to bring a pen and some paper and not write anything, than not bring them and wish you had.

Don’t overdo it.

Some people think it’s best to say something so you don’t appear to be “dead wood”. This is all very well if you have something to say, but saying something that doesn’t need to be said can be far more damaging than keeping quiet. Talking too much, especially if the discussion goes way off-topic, can be a very bad idea as it can make a meeting go on for a lot longer than it needs to. Stick to the subject at hand where possible.

Review your progress.

After the meeting, look back and see if you really did need to be involved, and whether the discussion could have been handled any differently. Give feedback to the chairperson if you have any suggestions for improving future meetings of a similar nature.

Those are my suggestions - do you have any tips for maximising the value of meetings? Can you remember your best and worst meetings? What made them so extreme?

Is this how you feel when you leave work, or do you take the stress with you?

Stress is not uncommon in a job, but failing to deal with it effectively can have a serious impact on your life.

I recently quit my position as an administrator for Entrecard, citing stress as the main reason. It was an unpaid role and I volunteered many hours of my time to deal with support queries. However, it was a highly busy job and some of the queries were extremely difficult to deal with.

At the start, I found myself helping out in a number of areas. I frequently offered to take on more work and did everything I could to make a difference. People appreciated the help. All was good.

However, as time progressed, I realised that other things were not getting done. Writing music, coding Injader, updating my blogs, these were all things that I enjoyed doing and somehow I just wasn’t finding the time to do them. Then I noticed that the Entrecard position was getting harder to do.

Between my day job and my volunteer work for Entrecard, I had very little time for anything else. Before, I would work on my own projects from time to time, which helped me to de-stress. At the time I didn’t realise that this was my way of de-stressing. It was only when I didn’t have time for my own projects anymore that things started to go bad.

Without warning, things suddenly got very tough for me. I was massively stressed out, unhappy, and I was making mistakes. The stress levels were simply too much for me to deal with, I lost focus of my goals, and a lot of things ground to a halt. This blog was one of those things, my music was another.

I knew that something had to give. So, I resigned my position at Entrecard, refocused my blogging priorities, and set up a new blog - Top Ten Blog Tips. I finally closed the doors on my blog at benbarden.com, and started to get my life back.

There are a few things I have learned from this experience.

1. Your life should have a realistic balance between work goals and personal goals. Not everyone enjoys their job, but even if you enjoy every minute of it, don’t overdo it. Otherwise, it’ll soon lose its shine.
2. You can’t de-stress if you take on too much. Watch out for the warning signs and consider making some changes if your life hits a serious downturn. Make time for your own activities no matter how demanding your work needs may be.
3. If things get to be too much, resist the urge to make a rash decision to get a “quick fix”. It may give you some relief, but it may not be the best way to approach the situation and it’s far more disruptive if you have to make two changes in quick succession than just the one. Wait until you can review the situation with a clear head, and make a decision then.

Sometimes we only seem to learn from our mistakes, but don’t ignore the warning signs. Thankfully, I did take action fairly early on. The main thing to remember is that you need to maintain a sensible balance to ensure things don’t get out of control.

That’s my view - how do you de-stress?

Do you know where you're headed before you set off?

It’s all too easy to dive into your work head first without doing any kind of planning.

But if you don’t establish a direction before you start, how will you know where to go, how to get there, and what to look out for along the way? More to the point, will you ever get to where you want to be, and will you even know whether you’re done or not?

Using a five-step approach

The Organised Approach to Websites includes some vital ways to get organised with your blog or website. This approach can be modified for almost anything. Here’s how the five-step approach looks for Zen Working.

1. Identify the task.

What are you going to do? It’s important to write a clear objective, otherwise you won’t have a goal that you can work to without significant difficulties. For now, just get the basic task written down. The detail gets added next.

2. Plan and research.

How will you get the job done? For starters, larger projects will need to be broken down into multiple objectives. If you were going to write a new blogging system, for instance, a bad objective would be “Develop a new blogging system”. You’ll get sick of not being able to tick the item off your list, and it will just not get done. Having a list of tasks that need to be done is vital before you go any further. Establish a clear sequence of events, identify dependencies, and add in some milestones.

3. Do the job.

For a development project, this means writing the code. It’s quite likely you’ll add in some extra layers of detail prior to commencing this stage. The main thing to be careful about is not to code until you know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how you’re doing it. If you broke the task down into clear objectives, the code should be all the easier to write.

4. Quality control.

Test, test, test. Don’t do all the work then review it at the end. Test as you go. With software, this doesn’t mean “check it works”. It means break it, then fix it. You want to find all the bugs at this stage, not later on. Code, test, re-code, re-test, and so on. And get someone else to help with the testing.

5. Implement and review.

Just because the task is complete, doesn’t mean your job is done. Post-project support and keeping in contact with the customer is really important. Keep an eye out for any new issues, and fix them. Ask for new requirements so you can build on what you’ve already put together. Ask for feedback on how the project went. Document your findings and decide if there’s anything you would do differently in future. There’s always something new to learn, something to improve on, and another job to do. Ensure you establish a routine of continuous improvement.

Anyway, that’s enough from me - do you know where you’re headed before you set off? Do you keep improving your methods?

Mind maps can help to break down large projects into manageable chunks.

Managing your workload with online tools or a great to-do list is fine for smaller jobs, but what about big projects? Here are 5 tools and concepts that you should consider when managing a large project.

Mind maps

A mind map is a diagram that starts with one word or phrase at the centre, with various thoughts and ideas spreading outwards. The further out you go, the greater the detail becomes.

Mind mapping is a great way to get all of your thoughts down on paper without trying to do it in a conventional list. You can organise your thoughts into a list later, but if you start with a top-to-bottom list you may run out of room. Mind maps are better for using all of the available space, and are much easier on the eye mostly due to the use of colours.

Project scope

Some projects may be susceptible to “out of scope” requirements being included just to get them done. Establish clear goals for the project and consider small changes, but stay within the project scope: that is, evaluate whether the changes submitted will meet the project objectives. Surplus changes can be considered if you run ahead of schedule, but are not the highest priority and should not detract from the critical path.

Dependencies and the critical path

Once you’ve got your tasks written down, it helps immensely if you can organise each task to indicate any dependencies on other tasks. For instance, you might want to create a design on paper before trying to code it, and you might want to think of a solid niche for a blog before planning your first posts.

Some projects have far more critical dependencies than others. For instance, if you’re a property developer and you’re building a house from the ground up (literally), you can’t build until you have a solid plan, and you can’t put the roof on first. It may seem obvious, but if you’re project managing a team of builders, you’ve got to understand the dependencies so you can tell them what to do when.

The “critical path” refers to the tasks that must be completed for the project to meet its objectives. Note that if you have 5 tasks to complete but each of them has a dependency, the dependencies become part of the critical path too.

Milestones

A milestone can be used as a kind of checkpoint to indicate when a specific workstream has completed. Assigning a date to a milestone means you have a goal to work towards. Big projects usually have several milestones, which poses less of a risk than having one milestone for the whole project. That way, if a milestone slips, you can adjust the subsequent milestones accordingly. This means you have a much clearer idea of when the project will conclude.

Milestones can break up inter-project dependencies. For instance, in software development projects there can be milestones to indicate the start or end of requirements gathering, design, development, system testing, user acceptance testing and implementation. There is often some overlap between the tasks, and there may be dependencies that span milestones, but milestones can still be used to highlight that non-urgent changes will not be accepted beyond a certain date. This is important to avoid late changes throwing the project timescales out.

Stage reviews

A vital part of running a large project is reviewing progress along the way, not just at the end of the project. If certain tasks are not going according to plan, they need to be addressed before those tasks start impacting on the other tasks. Early identification and resolution of problem areas is an extremely important part of getting your projects completed on time.

What other tips do you have for managing a large project?